Thursday, February 28, 2008

That protest

Iain Martin writes about it in The Daily Telegraph. I could not do better, so I won't even try. I particularly like the bit at the end:

Britain should realise that it cannot afford to be immersed in an out-of-date experiment and opt politely for trade and co-operation instead.

When being a small, adaptable cohesive unit is our historic strength, why choose to be stuck with a dozy, slow-moving and bureaucratic EU? We will require every ounce of national dexterity we possess to prosper in the next half-century.

The Lib Dems and other Euro-fanatics miss this because they are so used to thinking of their position as one that embodies modernity, when the opposite is increasingly the case. That makes this referendum campaign anything but the end. It is just a beginning.

Contrary to myth, the EU was not a construct which emerged out of the wreckage of the Second World War. As our regular readers will know, the intellectual genesis stemmed from the First World War, with the current structure of the EU set out in Arthur Salter's book, The United States of Europe, first published in 1933.

If the ideas behind this are set in 1918, this means that the EU is based on a concept which is now 90 years old – a solution devised for a different world, which has now changed beyond all recognition. Above all else, it is not "modernity". It is a stale, old creed, well past its sell-by date.